


a skin shed sixteen years past

by PikaCheeka



Category: DRAMAtical Murder (Visual Novel), DRAMAtical Murder - All Media Types
Genre: Gore, Hospital Setting, M/M, Matter of Life and Death, Yakuza, a most peculiar love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-06-01 09:04:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6512047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PikaCheeka/pseuds/PikaCheeka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Trip takes a bullet to the head when a Yakuza hit goes wrong and while he lies in a coma, Virus discovers that everything he thought he knew about himself was wrong.<br/>---<br/>When he awakens this time, Toue is not there, and he lays still on his cot and rips the inside of his arm open with two fingers, worrying at the edges of his skin until he can tear into them and widen the puncture wound where the sleep and the subsequent awareness had been injected into him. Let it drain. He looks at the hospital bed beside him, reads the numbers on the computer screens as he smears blood up and down his arm. The same, the same. The days crawl by and Trip keeps breathing, but Virus is running out of air.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a skin shed sixteen years past

**Author's Note:**

> I've experimented a lot with ViTri drabbles and I fully admit that I am still working out the characters and their relationship, but I figured I'd go ahead and post this one. You can tell how much I love a character by how injured and/or miserable they end up in my fics. As a heads-up, this entire fic takes place in a hospital, has a bit of gore and a lot of references to death, injury, needles, childhood trauma, etc!

 

He hears it before he sees it, sees it before he feels it, feels it before it rips his chest open and wraps him in an ill-fitting skin he’d shed and devoured sixteen years past.

_The man he’d just finished beating into the ground pulling out a gun they’d both somehow missed._

_Virus shouting, lunging forward, lifting his own weapon, as Trip gives him that bored yet satisfied look he always has right after he completes a hit._

_The explosion._

_Trip no longer looking bored or satisfied, only disappointed, as he jerked his left arm up as if to reach for Virus before collapsing to the ground._

\---

They hadn’t let him watch the operations, had dragged him hissing and snapping from surgery and locked him in the waiting room while they turned around and cut open his other half to try and save him. The thought of anyone but himself making Trip bleed is too much to bear and in that cold white waiting room _he remembers the institute_. He gnaws on his fingertips and tears at his hair, thick and blonde and stiff with gel and blood and dirt and nine hours of a horror he hasn’t felt in sixteen years, as he edges himself into the corner of the room and falls into a crouch and begins rocking back and forth on his heels. There is no adjustment because there is no decay. It is a break from reality as sharp and sudden and brutal as the gunshot. He is thirteen again, and on the other side of the wall they are cutting Trip apart, but instead of giving him a hole in his head they’re trying to fix one.

It was inevitable in their time together, given what they’d survived as children and what they did for a living as adults, that they’d have to consider what would happen if one of them died first. But Virus had always shrugged it off and smiled his serpentine leer and said it was no problem, the other would survive and adapt. It’s what they did. And in the back of his grin he’d remind himself that _after all_ , Trip was the one who had come to him. Trip was the one who’d followed him everywhere. Trip was the one who copied his every move. Trip was the one who wanted to look alike. They were equals in every way, except that Trip preferred to follow Virus. He’d always believed that if one of them went first, the one who would be better able to handle the fallout would be him. Because while deep in his teeth, something would remind him that Trip was the one who spoke for _himself_ , whereas Virus spoke for _us_ , he had grown good at clenching his jaw and grinding that thought down to nothing.

But now, as he sits in the corner of the waiting room and begins digging his nails around the edges of the floor tiles, he knows he was wrong, and there was a reason why he always spoke for the two of them. Trip is a part of him. Trip completes him. Trip makes Virus _Virus_ , and without Trip he doesn’t know how to behave anymore.

Virus can’t close his eyes again because the image of that explosion, the spray of blood emerging from the top of Trip’s head as he fell, is seared into his eyelids and fingertips for eternity, and so he digs at the plaster between the tiles and stares at the nothingness that has rapidly consumed his world, the synthetic blue of his eyes as inexpressive as it is vibrant as he struggles for air.

He doesn’t remember calling the number their Yakuza boss had always told them to call if they ever needed an ambulance, a swift ride to a private hospital where nobody would talk about whatever bodies they chose to leave behind and who might have made those corpses. He doesn’t remember sitting in the back of the van staring at the mess of Trip’s face, doesn’t remember how one doctor worked on that bloodied mess, while a second one gave him, _him_ , oxygen because he wasn’t breathing anymore. He knows these things happened, because he was told they happened, but he doesn’t remember. If he were himself, he’d find it amazing how quickly the world grinds to a halt, how the slow burn of torture that he so enjoys inflicting on others to break them down wouldn’t work on him, because his ticket to hell was in an elevator with a snapped cable. But he’s not himself, because the anesthesia should have worn off by now and the doctors are shaking their heads – it was such a long shot, anyway – as they lead Virus into the room.

Trip won’t wake up.

\---

When a nurse wheels a cot into the room and calmly suggests that he shower and change, Virus knows a day and a night has passed and they expect him to eat and wash and sleep and do all those things he was able to do when he was whole, but he doesn’t have the ability to tell them those things aren’t necessary anymore.

He’s still wearing the suit Trip had bled out on, the suit he wore when Virus vanished.

He finds he has trouble looking at the still form on the bed, oxygen mask covering his mouth and nose because they’d had to jumpstart his heart while sewing his head back up, synthetic bone and metal staples to hold the skull together, bandages covering the left half of his face and much of his scalp, only a quarter of his face uncovered, his right eyebrow hauntingly perfect in the maelstrom of hospitalization that awakens an old and enclosed horror in Virus’ mind. Everything had been bearable back then because Trip was there. Now Trip is at once there and gone, and nothing is bearable anymore.

On the third day he picks up the clipboard left at the table by his bedside. _Caucasian male._ Virus had always found it odd how quickly people took them for twins when Trip was _Irish,_ pale freckles across his shoulders, and he himself was half Japanese. _Hair blonde._ Hardly, not that it matters now that they’d shaved it all off to sew his head back together. Eyes _blue._ He remembers when they were green. _May/03/20__._ Six years and two months and eight days apart, enough for the doctors at the institute to be uncomfortable with them together. _Blood type B._ Virus can take his blood but not the other way around, an irony not lost on him. _Height 185 cm._ Even with the platforms he has worn for much of his adult life, he falls two centimeters below Trip. _Weight 93.4 kg._ A difference of over twenty kilograms. And the list goes on, tired statistics that have been measured on him, on them, time and again over their experimental lives, littered with question marks and circled numbers as doctors unaware of Trip’s past grappled with what they couldn’t understand. The numbers and factoids list how Trip and Virus are different, not how they are parts of the same whole. Different temperature, different blood pressure, different cholesterol levels, different numbers of teeth…

He suddenly tears the pages off the clipboard and throws it across the room, rips the papers to shreds and lets them fall to the floor as he retreats to the corner of the room and leans against the wall and wonders why there never seems to be enough air in this building. _Lies._ There are no differences, because while Trip still breathes beneath that mask on the silent white bed, he won’t wake up, and with him is the Virus that knows how to behave and knows what to do, so they must share the same body, the same everything, because there certainly isn’t anyone in this carcass in a three-days-bloodied suit.

\---

The days crawl by and Trip keeps breathing. The screens showing his vital signs never go red and never scream. The bandages are changed and the IVs are filled and other bags emptied. But he does not wake, and the deafening roar grows and grows in Virus’ mind until he’s backed into the corner, peeling the paint from the walls and rocking back and forth and back and forth and gasping for air.

On the fifth day, there is a visitor, not for the still form in the bed but for Virus.

_When did you last sleep?_ Virus hears the words but can’t process them, feels the hands on his arms dragging him away from the comforting wall but can’t place them, sees the face speaking but can’t recognize it. All he understands are his cracked fingers caulk white from picking at the painted walls and tiled floors for so long. He thinks he’s back at the institute.

When he feels the sharp prick on his neck, the first thing that crosses his mind is _Herscha_ and then _not now, Trip_ and just as he opens his mouth so scream because he remembers, the cold washes over his mind and he sinks to the floor. _Not now, Trip, not now, not ever…again…_

He dreams of a phone ringing in their empty penthouse. Name hidden. The battery is at zero percent and no one will answer but it keeps ringing because no one is calling either.

\---

He awakes in the cot that the nurses had put out for him two days before, three days before? He doesn’t know how long he slept, doesn’t want to ask, because he can see for himself that nothing has changed and every day that nothing changes edges closer to a static eternity.

Virus sits up slowly and absently rubs his neck where the needle had gone in, his skin uncomfortable and itchy, a snake whose skin no longer fits. It’s been a long time since this has happened.

“I thought it best.” A soft voice beside him. He knows it well.

“It’s fine.” _It’s not. He could have died while I was asleep. But_ he says nothing, only continues to rub his neck, harder and faster now, digging his nails in. He doesn’t want his skin anymore and he doesn’t want to be this awake, this horrifically _aware_.

When Toue stops him, he doesn’t resist, lets his hand fall dead to his lap. “I had to guess on the dose. Sixteen years since I last gave you that shot.”

_I know,_ Virus wants to say. Because of course he knows. Sixteen years and eight months and twenty-four days. Six thousand one hundred and thirteen nights. Most of those, he still did not sleep, not even for a moment, but the sleeplessness he feels by Trip’s side is not one of death.

He remembers the first time he met Toue, who had made it a habit, early on, to visit the children at the institute. The least he could do for the street kids and runaways and abandoned babies and unwanted and difficult children kidnapped or donated or left on the institute’s doorstep. Virus doesn’t know, doesn’t want to know, which of those he was. He had accidentally read part of Trip’s paperwork once and almost learned too much about _him_ , and he wasn’t about to ever do that for _himself_. No – he doesn’t remember where he came from. He only remembers Toue gently taking his hand, dragging him away from the wall that he’d been nervously, exhaustively tapping over and over just as he had been for eleven hours, bringing him to one of the nurses. _Why is he like this – he never sleeps – never? – not since the…_ Virus does not know and cannot remember to this day what happened to him to cause this. There’s no need to ask. He doesn’t need to know that either. _Can’t you give him something? – Only anesthesia works and he’s only seven – I’ll bring…_ Virus does not know what Toue gives him and he’s never asked.

And for nearly six years the man would stop by every week or two, check on him, speak to him, give him new books and tell him new stories of the world as he gently laid him down and plunged a syringe into his frail arm and sat with him until Virus slipped under. Those were the only nights in all those years that he’d slept, discounting the ones where he was under the knife, he supposes. And then one day _he_ had entered his life, had smoothed over that something broken in him, and Virus had terrified himself that night by falling asleep without the aid of medicine. It was the last time in sixteen years he’d felt fear. He’d thought he was dying, but he was only living in a way he’d never known, and the scales fell from his eyes when he awoke.

Toue had still come to him, though less and less over the years, with his books and stories and questions and careful eyes that told Virus he expected great things of him, but he no longer carried a syringe of yellow fluid. He hadn’t seemed surprised when Virus had softly told him he didn’t need it anymore. He’d slept – an hour! A whole hour! – and even when he couldn’t sleep, he no longer stared, no longer roamed, no longer pounded the walls and hummed and gasped for air.

And now it has happened again. Virus feels his fingers creeping back up to his neck as if they were not a part of him. _It has happened again._ Never in his life was there both this medicine and Trip. One or the other. Both can’t exist at the same time. Just like he and Trip can _only_ exist at the same time.

“Virus.” There is a warning in his voice.

He jerks his hand down, crushes it between his thighs. _You don’t even know who you’re speaking to._

“When was the last time you ate?”

He shakes his head so abruptly it’s more of a twitch, a shudder.

“It wouldn’t do any good to have you die.”

He doesn’t say _too_ , but it lingers between them, and Virus looks at him from the corner of his eyes. He’s pale, his mouth set hard in a face with more wrinkles than Virus remembers from only a week before. _He’s afraid_ , he realizes suddenly with a jolt. He’d rarely seen Toue interact with Trip; he always kept him at a respectful distance, even when the two of them were together. He’d always known they met occasionally, in private, away from him, both when Trip was still a child and as recently as last month, but there was nothing like what he had had with the older man.

Perhaps he simply never felt the need. They don’t speak of it and have never spoken of it, but Trip is the success. _The better put together one_. The one who benefitted from the mistakes made on Virus years before. They don’t talk about Virus’ health problems. How his body temperature is three degrees below normal , how he’s always cold and clammy, how his immune system is trashed, how he has one and a half lungs from a botched surgery, how he has chronic insomnia so severe it’s cutting into his life, how his tear ducts were destroyed and how one of his brutally dry eyes always itches. Virus’ health problems are like the nightmares he and Trip share, brutal and silent and unspoken.

Yes, Trip is the success. There were no complications with the surgeries, the enhancements – at least, not ones that affected him, though the scars and shattered bones of his doctors might speak otherwise. He was also bigger, stronger, and while _simpler_ was inappropriate to use on someone like him, he obeyed directions better than Virus, thought less about things, was more stoic in response. He was more physical, more visceral, more ready and willing. His eyes are stronger than Virus’, sharper and faster and brighter, able to pick up the most minute movements, able to protect him from the voice just as much as the eyes. Virus is close behind him, one of the few to not go blind, but he is not as powerful as Trip. He never even had the chance. Toue has seen that, had foreseen everything, and instead honed his mind, and perhaps because of this omniscience knew there was no reason to grow so close to Trip, and had always kept him at a distance. _Perhaps Toue always knew he would d_ – but the thought can not form.

“I won’t die,” he finally speaks, his voice calm and dead and unrecognizable to himself, though he somehow knows that it’s the same voice he’s always had. He won’t die because he can’t die because he’s not himself anymore. There’s no more Virus.

\---

He later learns he’d slept for seventeen hours, and those seventeen hours feed him long after Toue leaves, long after the night shift at the hospital begins again and the guard the Yakuza left for him falls asleep and wakes up and falls asleep. Time blurs for Virus, at once painfully aware of the tick of every second and numb to the passage of those ticks. He knows all too well what every minute, every hour, every day that Trip lies there unmoving means. He’s seen enough people die to know that the longer a coma lasts, the harder it is to wake up, the weaker the body is.

On the eighth night he finally touches Trip for the first time since he’d been shot. His nose first. He remembers a time seven years ago when Trip had suddenly touched Virus’ face and sighed and commented on how their noses were different. Virus had shrugged and kept on reading and half-wondered if Trip would reappear with a nose job the same way he’d reappear with blonde hair and eyebrows and matching earrings and clothing. But he hadn’t. It had been the one and only time he’d ever mentioned how different their faces were, one of a thousand times Virus had thought about the delicate beauty of skulls and how different his must look from Trip’s. Trip with his square jaw and long face and nose crooked from one too many fights to Virus’ soft, round face and gentle supraorbital ridge. _And now and now_ his fingers trace the edge of the bandages on the left side of Trip’s face _and now_ _that delicate skull is even less like mine_. He can’t bring himself to look too closely at the bandages, can’t bring himself to push the oxygen mask aside and peel his lips back and look at the wires holding his shattered jaw together.

Once when they’d been sixteen and twenty-two, Virus had been shot, a glancing blow that passed right through his right arm, and Trip had plunged his fingers into the hole and wrinkled his nose and said he could feel Virus’ heart beat inside his arm and abruptly kissed him on the mouth before calmly making a tourniquet from the older man’s tie. They didn’t go to a hospital. Trip knew how much Virus hated them without them ever needing to discuss it, and so he treated the wound and stitched it shut and they let it heal on its own, a faint tug on the skin of his inner right arm every time he straightened his elbow for the rest of his life. Virus remembers this now, and remembers the gaping hole left by the bullet in Trip’s skull. They had always been such equals, and yet he hadn’t returned this favor. Hadn’t fingered the wound and hadn’t felt his heartbeat and hadn’t kissed him and hadn’t taken care of him.

He climbs onto the bed slowly, lifting the cover just enough to slide his legs under and ducking beneath the tubes attached to his arm, and lays down beside him. Trip is still warmer than he ever was and is and ever will be, and he finds this unexpectedly comforting. He is still breathing, his body metabolizing, his heart beating. _There is that_ , Virus thinks dully as he squeezes his eyes closed and leans his forehead against Trip’s still, still shoulder. He always slept heavily, easily, and often, similar to his Allmate in so many ways, and Virus wonders for the briefest of moments if he can pretend he is only asleep. But no. Because when Trip sleeps, he clings to Virus, with his full body wrapped around him or a mere finger tangled in his hair, Trip clings to him when he sleeps, and now he is still and silent and the one being touched. He has become the object, _the passive one_. _He has become Virus_ , the older man thinks and immediately regrets – another emotion he hasn’t felt in sixteen years – regrets because they are equals and he can’t be thinking like that. They are equals. And he gently kisses Trip’s right arm, just over where his own bullet scar lies.

He doesn’t sleep, but he lays there for hours. When he finally becomes aware that he needs to use the toilet, he stands slowly, as if he were being pulled apart, ducking beneath the tubes attached to Trip’s arm. He takes his glasses off and folds them gently on the pillow beside Trip’s still face. He doesn’t need them after all, the lenses only plain glass.

\---

Toue comes again on the eleventh night, a change of clothes, William Faulkner’s _Absalom, Absalom!_ and a syringe of yellow fluid his three gifts for Virus, who this time accepts them all without complaint, not because he wants to sleep but because he knows he should do as he’s told. A world without Trip is a world without agency. As he slips into oblivion for the second time in twelve days he feels a hand on his forehead and wonders if he is thirteen or twenty-nine and who he was these last sixteen years and who he is now.

He dreams, but this time he dreams of nothing.

When he awakens this time, Toue is not there, and he lays still on his cot and rips the inside of his arm open with two fingers, worrying at the edges of his skin until he can tear into them and widen the puncture wound where the sleep and the subsequent awareness had been injected into him. _Let it drain_. He looks at the hospital bed beside him, reads the numbers on the computer screens as he smears blood up and down his arm. _The same, the same._ The days crawl by and Trip keeps breathing, but Virus is running out of air.

\---

The thirteenth night is worse than the twelve before, as with the arrival of the fourteenth day Virus knows the doctors must have _a talk_. He knows a lot about medical law, having been peculiarly interested in just how much illegal experimentation was forced upon his frail body as a child, and he knows that two weeks is all that is guaranteed. Even for a high-ranking Yakuza hitman, Trip is only a hitman, one with a bullet to the brain besides, and this is a waste of time and resources for everyone. Virus grits his teeth and feels beneath Trip’s bed for his gun, the one he should have used thirteen nights ago. It’s still there. A thousand scenarios of how to use it tomorrow run through his mind as he rocks back and forth on his heels and knocks his head against the wall. The syringe of yellow fluid seems a lifetime ago.

At two seventeen in the morning he digs his Coil out of the pile of clothes on his cot and flips through his history. The hospital. Trip. Trip. Trip. Toue. Trip. Trip. Trip. Trip. Trip. They live together, are never apart for more than half an hour, and yet they incessantly call one another from one room to the next. He remembers the last time they’d had sex, when Trip had called him from his bedroom just after midnight and said he wanted him and promptly hung up while Virus rolled out of his own bed and padded down the hall to his room. He’d always thought it strange that they had their own bedrooms when at least six nights a week they share a bed. Virus closes his eyes and shudders and keeps pressing _down down down_ because he knows all the rest of the calls in the last week he used his Coil were Trip. He has two other Coils that he uses for business so there’s no need to share his private number.

When he finally opens his eyes again he sees a new name in the midst. _Aoba_.

He clicks _call_ without thinking. He listens to the ring without thinking. He hears the groggy, confused voice on the other end of the line ask who’s there because the visuals are turned off without thinking. And he responds without thinking. _“I don’t know.”_

Aoba swears, hesitates, sighs. “Virus?”

He doesn’t know what to say so simply avoids the question. “Aoba-san?”

“Yea, Virus, look it’s almost two thirty and I…” he falls silent a moment. “You and Trip usually call together.”

It isn’t a question, and the fact that it isn’t is enough to push Virus over the edge he’d been leaning over. There are no tears as he leans slowly over to the side and begins to sob, biting into his wrist to stem the keening wail he’d been holding back since that first day here. And he wails and hiccups and sobs relentlessly, his eyes burning and itching as the scar tissue beneath them struggles to react. Aoba is silent, stunned and horrified, but he stays on the line, and he stays and he stays until Virus finally comes to a shuddering halt and whispers an apology that Aoba reciprocates and suddenly it’s over. Something snaps in those synthetic eyes and Virus finds himself smiling by rote and murmuring that it’d be better for the younger man to forget this ever happened, _much better_ , and he hangs up with a click and a leer and an eruption of a third emotion he hasn’t felt in sixteen years. Disgust.

He pulls the gun out from under the bed and makes sure that it’s loaded, and leans back against the wall to wait for dawn.

\---

“We know he is of importance to… _the family_ ,” the doctor speaks delicately, paid well to ensure that police never hear the truth about the injuries he works with but uncomfortable nonetheless. _Weak_. “But protocol suggests two weeks. Even if he wakes up at this time, we don’t know how much damage his brain has suffered.”

He wants to point out that this is Trip, and Trip doesn’t function by brain, but by fists and eyes and so much else that he briefly considers divulging if only for the momentary look of revulsion and horror that he is such an expert in forcing out of others, but he holds his tongue. It’s taking everything he has to speak, to focus his eyes and see, to move this carcass the same way he used to, and control is harder than he anticipated. Instead he folds his hands, looks at the table, and speaks very softly, courteously. “I’ll take care of him.”

“The bullet passed vertically through his left frontal lobe.”

“Neatly,” Virus cuts in. He knows there are cases of people surviving this, people waking up and being, for all intents and purposes, perfectly fine. People who are hardly so perfectly engineered as Trip.

“He might be…different.”

Virus spreads his fingers slowly. There’s no reason for anyone to point this out beyond sheer malice, but he knows something about Trip that even the neurosurgeons missed, as they had no access to that childhood institute’s medical records, and so he smiles. Because what they are insinuating, the oft-called _Phineas Gage Syndrome_ , cannot have any effect on someone like Trip. The sliver of his brain that was destroyed wasn’t being used anyway. “I will take care of him, whether he wakes up or not. He stays on the machines.”

“It’s costing your – _our_ – boss…” he goes on but Virus is no longer listening. He knows he should have had him transferred to a hospital that Toue Inc and Morphine had leverage in, but the incident resulted from a Yakuza hit, negotiations were complicated even when he was confident in his level of control and besides, the move would have been dangerous for him.

So he sighs and slips his cracked fingers under the table and withdraws the cold metal from his waistband. The sound of the safety going off echoes in the silence of the room. “He stays on the machines.”

\---

The fourteenth night is almost as long as the thirteenth, though this time he keeps his Coil off and stares into the darkness alone. Trip keeps breathing, but Virus has finally run out of air, and the gun is heavy and temptuous in his hands.

Yet while the abyss is dark and deep and beckoning, he can’t bring himself to pull the trigger, because he cannot be sure who is at the end of the barrel. _Trip or Virus or both of them or someone else entirely_. Instead he sits silently, rubbing the butt of the pistol listlessly against the crook of his elbow, picking loose the scabs he’d created days before, wondering if and when he will get another shot, if and when Trip will finally stop breathing, if and when he will ever taste air again. He’s learned these fourteen days and nights that there is nothing interesting about the end of the world.

\---

Sixteen days, eight hours, and twenty-four minutes after the bullet punctured his skull, Trip wakes up.

His right eye opens first, sunken and bloodshot and exhausted, and the moment Trip registers light and blinks, Virus is by his side.

What Virus suddenly feels is _not_ something he hasn’t felt in sixteen years, but something he doesn’t recall ever feeling before, or perhaps it is something he’d steadily felt all those years, and never noticed until it was suddenly threatened. It doesn’t matter though, because _Trip is awake_ and looking at him, and suddenly these last several weeks don’t exist anymore. Virus makes no movement to touch him, to hug him, to ask how he is doing, to even say his name.

There is silence for some time, and he only speaks when he sees the oxygen mask fog in new patterns and realizes that Trip is trying to speak. “Don’t. Your jaw needs to heal.” As he says the words he signs them, silently reminding him that they still have a way to speak, leftover from their days at that other white place. Virus finds himself shaking, but the voice that comes forth from his mouth and fingers is one he recognizes.

Trip’s reaction is fully expected, his eye suddenly narrowing as he raises his right hand, tubes in his arm quivering, jerks the mask down, and runs his fingers over his face. The moment his fingers touch the edges of the bandages, he rips them off. Virus flinches at the surgical staples along his cheekbone, the glint of metal he can see in Trip’s mouth as he breathes, but the visible damage is not as bad as he’d expected from a bullet entering his cheek from below and exiting through the top of his skull. Until he _sees_.

The entirety of his left eye is a pale, milky blue, a watered down version of the piercing blue of his right iris flooding the sclera. It would be impossible, were it a normal human eye, but there is nothing normal about either of them.

“Blind, eh.” His voice is slurred, spilling out from his cracked jaw. He was never one for obeying doctor’s orders. He groans, bares his teeth, wired shut to within a centimeter, and signs the next few words. “ _We’re not…same_.”

But Virus doesn’t respond. He only stares. He can see the confusion erupting in Trip. _We’re not the same anymore._ For one paralyzing moment, he feels fear, uncertainty, but then it is gone. He will not feel these things ever again. Trip is awake and Trip is alive and Trip _remembers_ and Trip is the same as he was sixteen days ago, eye or no eye – Virus knows him so intimately on a level they have never questioned that a few words are all he needs to understand this. And if Trip is Trip then he is Virus and _he knows how to behave._ He feels the past absorb itself and sink back into him, an old skin he’d shed and swallowed centuries past, and then he smiles.

He touches Trip’s nose, strokes his forehead, picks up what he’d let on his pillow eight days ago, and carefully holds it up so that Trip can see with his good eye.

“Shall I order an identical pair or would you prefer pink frames?”

 

 


End file.
